Photographer Rocky McCorkle's Cinematic Study of Former Neighbor

The San Francisco Chronicle, Sam Whiting

Rocky McCorkle’s apartment is decorated in images that are larger than life — the life of his former downstairs neighbor Gilda Todar, to be exact. Every Sunday evening for five years, McCorkle, 36, brought Todar, 87, up for a photo shoot on a set that he had spent all week decorating as if it were the 1950s. It took half an hour to make one image, and the next week they did it all over again — a process slower than clay animation.

By the time the project was finished, these upstairs-downstairs strangers had a rapport that brings to mind “Harold and Maude,” and McCorkle had 135 huge prints that he could hang on a wall end to end to tell a story, starring Todar.

Called “You and Me on a Sunny Day,” the as-of-yet-displayed exhibition “is a walk-through movie in a museum,” says McCorkle, who has a master’s in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and a job as a commercial photographer for a women’s apparel catalog. That pays for his noncommercial work, which cost $15 in film every time he clicked an image of Todar on his large-format camera.

“The story is about an old lady whose husband passed away a few years ago, and she’s thinking about him as she goes through her daily life,” he says. “I don’t know where it came from. It was just subconscious about seeing what my grandma went through.”

The stills were shot in the Warrington Apartments in the Tenderloin, where McCorkle was living at the time. He hung a flyer in the lobby stating that he was “looking for an older model for a long-term project,” and paying $20 for a half hour’s work, once a week. Eight people responded, and he did a screen test on each one.

“I was so happy he was looking for an old woman. That’s how I was able to get the part,” says Todar, a retired city worker who is single and has lived on the ground floor at the Warrington since 1981. She had not acted since a grammar school play in San Mateo, so there was a lot of pent-up performance waiting to get out.

Her costume came from her own clothes. McCorkle would come pick them out before each shoot. “I used to psyche myself up before I went up there,” Todar says. “I felt like I was in the movies, in a way.” Each shot required her to strike a pose and hold it perfectly still for half a minute or more to get the exposure.

“That was sort of taxing,” she says, in a voice that sounds scratchy from the loss of a vocal cord.

As time went on, Todar revealed to McCorkle that when she was growing up in San Mateo, she’d acted in school plays and thought she had a shot at the bright lights attained by a schoolmate, Merv Griffin.

“She’d wanted to be an actress,” McCorkle says. “This was her first starring role. She was sad we were ending. She felt like she was really improving.”

The Berkeley Art Museum bought one of his prints, which are each 3 feet tall and 7 feet long, and displayed it, but it lacks context to look at one shot from “You and Me” among a bunch of other work by other artists.

To exhibit the whole piece would require 1,000 linear feet (the length of three football fields) of wall space, which limits the venues. The Tate in London or the Guggenheim in New York come to mind. Pier 24 Photography on the Embarcadero would be perfect. Read the full article here